According to some authentic sources, there are interesting speculations about the US healthcare industry. Revenue pool for industry segments like HST (health services and technology) is likely to grow at a rate of 8% CAGR starting from 2023 to the year 2028. Software platforms as well as advanced data and analytics are expected to achieve a double-digit growth. This growth is mostly expected through sales of innovative technologies.
In this backdrop, healthcare businesses around the world are steadily investing in custom healthcare software development. The range of software covers several key aspects to ensure remote monitoring of health through smartphones.
A few of those aspects include:
- Managing patient data to ensure fast and accurate information access
- Aligning the latest health research solutions with diagnosing patients
- Scheduling appointments and serving timely reminders
- Handling overall patient management
- Management of drugs
- Integrating video conferences, chats and a host of other cutting-edge tools to facilitate both remote consultation and care delivery
- Remote monitoring of data based on patient health to provide proactive care (also called Remote Patient Monitoring or RPM)
- The entire processes of billing and claims management are automated
- Leveraging a host of reporting and analytics tools to provide data-driven insights and help healthcare providers make informed decisions in the process
- Practical application of AI to accomplish a host of tasks with greater ease ranging from predictive analysis to improved diagnostic capabilities and automating workflows
As a result of all the unprecedented developments one thing is sure and that is the landscape of medical care is changing steadily unlike ever before.
The entire range of custom healthcare software proves a boon for every segment of healthcare. These include medical records, wellness, management, nutrition, insurance, overall administration and even healthcare education. Thanks to modern data technologies, individual care is simpler now. And along with that bringing any particular process close to excellence and providing dynamic solutions are much simpler too.
Custom healthcare software development and its hurdles
Inspite of all these positive contributions that custom healthcare software introduces the road to developing the range of digital applications is full of hurdles and challenges. In the following sections of the post let us explore few of those major challenges.
Customer-centricity ensures one and all can access these platforms easily
One of the obvious roadblocks faced in developing and healthcare software application is ensuring its customer-centricity. Different entities across the healthcare supply chain include doctors, nurses, lab technicians and even users at times.
- Each of these entities often launches or provides new healthcare services from time to time
- Keeping this in kind it is indeed necessary to design a product such that leads from a thorough customer-centric approach instead of a platform-centric one
In other words, a solution that is meant for healthcare business must be developed keeping only customers in the mind. We talked to techies with years of experience in healthcare software development. They explain to make a product customer-centric, they emphasize on features like –
- Easy to use dashboards
- Enabling unified access and most importantly
- A striking design
Real-time approach and steady device support are necessary
Usually healthcare data is managed by a handful of people who make use of several other devices at one go. This makes important for healthcare applications to reflect real-time data across a range of tools or devices to enable ideal decision-making at the right moments.
Software developers rely on technologies like
- Agile
- DevOps and
- Microservices, etc.
These technologies make medical software applications responsive and cloud-friendly. This is how they ensure new features and updates can be incorporated to the products easily. New features and updates ensure a good user-experience for any product including software applications.
Ever-changing cyber security requirements
Cyber security is a major concern in healthcare industry. Volumes of data related to patient health get generated every day. This data need to be stored properly. In building medical software solutions emphasize must be given on aspects like
- Data theft
- Ransomware attacks
- Data misuse
- Breaches in information
To cater to ever-changing cyber security requirements, software developers appraise firmware, implement solid impregnable firewalls and security patches among many other things
Importance of device integration and seamless connectivity to different systems
The basic setting of healthcare businesses is such that you cannot deny interoperability of the platform under any circumstance. Healthcare data of patients along with treatment and diagnosis information must be easily and securely accessible to stakeholders whenever required. Thus any software application that is developed should be decidedly interoperable.
Huge scalability and availability – both are must
In order to take the right decisions related to healthcare, relevant platforms must be high in features like availability and uptime. This is where health industry is quite unlike others. Downtime in this line of service often marks the difference between life and death. Achieving each of these aspects is not easy for software developers while building any healthcare application. They mostly rely on cloud computing and digital transformation to ensure certain information remains safe. Keeping sensitive data out of access from unauthorized users is vital. Along with that the data also need to be backed up from time to time. The application itself must be scalable and seamlessly accessible almost every moment.
Rapid decision-making with low latency platforms
Decisions on care-giving often have to be made in a hurry in healthcare business. Developers also need avoiding building a platform that is low in latency. The obvious option when software development is concerned is –
- Making use of both tools and technologies that accelerate things in one hand and
- Saving time on the other
Developers with years of experiences in working on HIPAA compliant software development programs explain Edge computing is used to achieve these targets. It ensures greater ease in information analysis. Simultaneously it also boosts feedback time while maintaining the necessary bandwidth.
Receiving volumes of information from an increasing number of medical systems and devices
The value information plays a critical role in forecasting diseases, diagnosing epidemics and speed up medical testing processes. All these factors enhance overall treatments. On the other hand receiving huge volumes of information from a steadily rising number of healthcare devices is obvious in modern healthcare. That information needs to be analyzed to achieve actionable insights. All these tasks though sound simple are actually difficult task to accomplish. Above everything else, when you have to keep accomplishing these tasks continuously, you experience even greater difficulties on regular basis.
Thankfully there are cutting-edge technologies like
- Big data
- Machine learning (ML) and
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
These technologies facilitate speed and accuracy in information analysis. Using these technologies along with others it becomes possible gaining powerful insights, outlining data, notice trends and improve inventory management. Most importantly these technologies help improving overall patient care results.
User information – maintaining confidentiality
As far custom software development related to healthcare is concerned, one of its massive roadblocks includes –
- Maintaining privacy and confidentiality of patient information
So it is important to emphasize on robust and foolproof plans right from the onset of such development processes. In simple words, how information is collected, stored and deleted ensure the level of privacy that can be maintained related to patient information.
Smooth and memorable user experience is the key to success
Healthcare is a priority and there is no second thought about it. But people often have too little time to visit clinics and get their checkups on time. This is why, more and more people are trending toward care apps. The range of apps serves as an alternative to visit clinics for necessary checkups.
User experience turns out to be the buzzword in healthcare software designing. It ensures good and memorable services to people. In fact a good user experience becomes even more relevant in improving efficiency of devices. It is also relevant in improving usability of designing solutions at the same time.
Selecting the right technology stack
In custom software development, choosing the right technology stack is a top priority. Custom healthcare software development is no different to that. Few things that developers need focusing upon from the beginning of such projects include the following-
- Data storage technologies that are to be implemented
- The operating system or O/S that needs to be installed
- Language or languages that are meant to be used in a project
- Technical help and resources that could be required in the project
When custom software development services are concerned, it is important ensuring that a software application integrates all administrative and clinical processes. This makes the product high in efficiency. The product or platform may include relevant features like the following –
- An appointment solution to enable users book an appointment
- A payment solution which automates all payments and insurance claims
Speed and performance matter
Software architects and analysts customize applications to improve efficiency and performance. This is done in various ways including the following –
- Providing capacity planning as well as sizing assistance
- Ensuring proficiency in open-source, third-party and proprietary tools
- Scaling user satisfaction, availability and response time from a single console point across various physical locations
- Actual monitoring of the entire cloud infrastructure including the VM, the apps, the hypervisor layer and others
There is no second opinion about the fact that custom healthcare software development services is a thoroughly complex procedure. One must overcome a number of contrasting challenges to achieve success in these development programs. In this context it is relevant mentioning Digital Aptech, which has been delivering high-quality custom healthcare software development one after the other over the years while catering to specific needs of an ever-growing global clientele. Only by overcoming those challenges it is possible creating digital applications that are effective, efficient, reliable, robust and most importantly capable of meeting specific needs of both patients and healthcare professionals.
